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YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory
(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.
A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.
As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.
Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.
This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.
We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.
“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart.
Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy.
Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)
The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived.
Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”
If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.”
Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”
For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material.
Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”
I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known.
“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”
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A Palestinian and an Israeli bereaved in violence make the case for peace
Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon have a message that can sound utterly preposterous as violence hardens as the main mode of communication between Israelis and Palestinians: The Future Is Peace, the title of their new book.
They are dead serious — and bring their own grief and healing to the cause.
On October 7, 2023, Inon’s parents, Bilha and Yakovi, were killed by Hamas terrorists in their home in Netiv Haasara near the border with Gaza. Decades earlier, Abu Sarah’s brother, Tayseer, was killed by Israeli forces following a year-long detention for alleged stone throwing.
You might recognize Abu Sarah and Inon from the winter Olympics, where the world watched as they carried the torch together—the first Israeli and Palestinian duo to ever do so — or from photos of them embracing the Pope, a picture of brotherhood.
Their book takes readers on an eight-day journey through the region, from the streets of East Jerusalem, where Abu Sarah grew up, to the farmland in the kibbutz that Inon’s father tilled. Along the way, they meet other bereaved families and friends who have been touched by the conflict. They found that the resistance to engaging with the other side’s narrative came from a fear of erasing one’s own.
Agreement, they concurred during an interview in Manhattan, is not a prerequisite. “I think what we bring in the future is peace is that we show first you don’t have to agree on everything. It doesn’t matter if you are pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, there will be things you will disagree with, there will be language you will not be happy with, there will be things that you think we got wrong,” said Abu Sarah.
For them, non-consensus is the beauty of the book — and their relationship with one another. “Relationships which have no disagreement, by the way, are boring,” he added. “We often quote Pope Francis, who said, ‘The only place that has no disagreement is a cemetery.”
Inon suggests the skeptical reaction to peacemaking is a coping mechanism. “You’re protecting yourself from wanting to believe. You think no one knows how to take you there.” He added, “We talk along the journey about the importance of dreaming. What we realized is that when you don’t dream, the others, the extremists, are dreaming for us, and then their dream is our nightmare.”
Parallel paths to peace
Abu Sarah’s experience living under the occupation and growing up in the West Bank led him to pursue anti-Israel activism.
At age 10, he watched his “protector,” the sibling he shared a bed with each night, succumb to his wounds from injuries sustained during his time in an Israeli prison. “All I knew was that someone had killed my brother, and I wanted to hit back,” he says in the book.
Following his death, and during the years spent living under occupation, Abu Sarah sought revenge. Eventually, when he realized it would be difficult to get a job without speaking Hebrew, he enrolled in a Hebrew language class — the first time he had ever met an Israeli who was not a soldier at a checkpoint.
As he began connecting with his teacher and classmates, he slowly let down his guard. Getting to know Israelis beyond the context of occupation gave him a new perspective and sparked his interest in peacebuilding. Eventually, he founded Mejdi Tours, leading dual-narrative trips across Israel with a Jewish counterpart, explaining landmarks through the lens of their respective communities.
Inon made his own journey to connecting across the divide, starting long before Oct. 7. As so many young Israelis do, he and his wife, Shlomit, had traveled the world after their army service. He realized that he had developed friendships with people in far-flung countries but hadn’t managed to make a single Palestinian friend back home.
Passionate about tourism as a means of connection, Inon decided to open a guesthouse in Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel. When he first came to Nazareth, many were skeptical of him. “There were many rumors that I was a Mossad agent, or Shin Bet, even worse,” said Inon. Over time, he began to build relationships and trust in the Palestinian community.
The murder of his parents could have been the end of his mission. Instead, Inon recommitted himself to it. Just days after Oct. 7, Inon and his siblings publicly stated that they did not seek revenge against the Palestinian people for the atrocities committed that day. He even hosted a memorial service in Nazareth so that his Palestinian friends living in the city could attend.
While they had lived somewhat parallel lives, with both men working in the travel industry as a means for peace, Inon and Abu Sarah met only once, several years before Oct.r 7.
After Abu Sarah learned of the death of Inon’s parents, he decided to reach out. Inon’s immediate empathy was striking to Abu Sarah, for whom forgiveness of the other side took years. A friendship and partnership began. “I lost my parents on Oct. 7, but I gained Aziz as a brother,” said Inon.
I asked them what moments of tension have been like in their relationship. Inon said the two have managed to find common ground over shared values. But for a long time, he struggled to get on board with the value of justice, which is a priority for Abu Sarah.
“I kept telling Aziz, I don’t know how to bring justice to Tayseer or my parents. I remember President Biden saying that when Israel assassinated Nasrallah, justice was being done. But with the same bomb, 300 civilians were killed. So will it now be legitimate for them to avenge the death of … their innocent loved ones?”
Eventually, after discussions with religious leaders, Inon came around to embracing the idea of justice. He discovered that of the 613 mitzvot in Judaism, the only two that are mandated are justice and peace. “After learning that, I said Aziz, from now on, I can have justice within the values that I believe.”
Another disagreement they’ve faced: Abu Sarah’s love for country music — Inon can’t stand it.
A different kind of solution
Inon and Abu Sarah can seem almost radical in their commitment to dialogue. To some, their approach may feel detached from reality. They know that most Israelis and Palestinians do not think the way they do. But to them, the belief that violence is inevitable is far more difficult to accept.
“Loss, instead of making us want to walk away, makes us more convinced that this is the only path, “ said Abu Sarah. “Really, if we give up, then what we should do is go get a gun and shoot at each other. Because what’s the alternative? You either believe we can solve this by sitting and working it out, or you believe we have to kill each other, and we refuse to believe that alternative.”
Notably, only one page of the book is devoted to discussing a solution to the conflict in the literal sense. “Here are shelves of practical solutions, chapter after chapter about borders, about water resources, about Jerusalem, about refugees, about security arrangements,” said Inon, laughing about the Israel-Palestine section that has become a fixture of many bookstores following the Gaza war. For them, the book is less about prescribing a specific political outcome and more about laying the emotional groundwork needed to get there.
Abu Sarah and Inon did not want to close themselves off by endorsing a single political solution. “We don’t want to be in a box,” Inon said, explaining that neither of them feels strongly tied to one specific outcome.
“Our values are human dignity, security and safety for everyone, recognition of everyone … People want to argue with us, two states, one state, three states, monarchy. That’s less the issue. If that agreement is based on those values,” said Abu Sarah. “Then we’ll be fine, regardless of the political ‘blah, blah, blah,’ if it’s not, you can have the nicest drawn map, and it will fail.”
Mocking the peacemaker
While both men had been engaged in peace work long before Oct. 7, that day and the war in Gaza that followed changed the landscape. Colleagues and friends told them they could no longer find it in themselves to care about the suffering of the other side.
“Palestinian friends would say … this happened because of what they’ve been doing to us … Then I would talk to Jewish friends who would tell me, ‘I used to sympathize with you Palestinians, but from now on, I just don’t care,’” Abu Sarah said. “The moment you do that, part of your humanity dies. I prefer to have the pain of feeling than to kill that part of me that maybe makes it easier.”
Abu Sarah said that when he tells people he is a peacemaker, they are incredulous. “They go, Oh, well, how is that going? Like in a mocking way.” He compared it to those working to find a cure for cancer. “If you’ve met a cancer researcher who’s trying to develop vaccines… you would respond to someone who is trying to make vaccines, saying, ‘God bless you.’”
“Peace has been done many times. A cancer vaccine has not,” he remarked, laughing.
Inon recalled a memory of his father shared during his parents’ shiva. Every night, his siblings sat around the table listening to him — the manager of the kibbutz’s farm — talk about his day.
“He would share the catastrophe in the fields,” Inon said. “The floods, the drought, the wildfire, the insects. Every day there was something new.”
But he always had faith in next year’s crop.
“He would say that next year, he will sow again. It doesn’t matter how devastating this season is,” he continued. “He will learn from his mistakes. He will consult with other farmers … and next season, he will sow again — not with prayers, not just believing, but knowing that next year will be better.”
The post A Palestinian and an Israeli bereaved in violence make the case for peace appeared first on The Forward.
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French Appeals Court Rejects Antisemitism Charge in Case of Nanny Who Poisoned Jewish Family
Tens of thousands of French people march in Paris to protest against antisemitism. Photo: Screenshot
A French appeals court has acquitted a nanny of antisemitism charges after she was sentenced for poisoning the food of the Jewish family she worked for, in what appears to be yet another instance of France’s legal system brushing aside antisemitism as a potential motive for crime.
On Wednesday, the Versailles Court of Appeal, located just southwest of Paris, upheld the nanny’s previous conviction but again rejected the aggravating circumstance of antisemitism, after prosecutors appealed a criminal court ruling that had acquitted the family’s nanny of antisemitism-aggravated charges after she poisoned their food and drinks.
Last year, the 42-year-old Algerian woman was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “administering a harmful substance that caused incapacitation for more than eight days.”
Residing illegally in France, the nanny had worked as a live-in caregiver for the family and their three children — aged two, five, and seven — since November 2023.
During the first trial, a French court declined to uphold any antisemitism charges against the defendant, given that her incriminating statements were made several weeks after the incident and were recorded by a police officer without a lawyer present.
Now, the Versailles Court of Appeal ruled in its latest decision that the nanny’s remarks do not even constitute antisemitic statements.
The family’s lawyer announced plans to appeal the decision again, arguing that the repeated rejection of the antisemitism-aggravating circumstance overlooks the seriousness of the case and its legal characterization.
“This decision makes the judicial prosecution of antisemitism impossible and reduces protective laws to nothing more than empty words,” they said during a press conference. “Faced with rulings like this, those seeking justice risk losing all faith in the judicial system and any sense of protection it is meant to provide.”
The nanny, who has been living in France in violation of a deportation order issued in February 2024, was also convicted of using a forged document — a Belgian national identity card — and barred from entering France for five years.
The shocking incident occurred in January 2024, just two months after the caregiver was hired, when the mother discovered cleaning products in the wine she drank and suffered severe eye pain from using makeup remover contaminated with a toxic substance, prompting her to call the police.
After a series of forensic tests, investigators detected polyethylene glycol — a chemical commonly used in industrial and pharmaceutical products — along with other toxic substances in the food consumed by the family and their three children.
According to court documents, these chemicals were described as “harmful, even corrosive, and capable of causing serious injuries to the digestive tract.”
Even though the nanny initially denied the charges against her, she later confessed to police that she had poured a soapy lotion into the family’s food as a warning because “they were disrespecting her.”
“They have money and power, so I should never have worked for a Jewish woman — it only brought me trouble,” the nanny told the police. “I knew I could hurt them, but not enough to kill them.”
According to her lawyer, the nanny later withdrew her confession, arguing that jealousy and a perceived financial grievance were the main factors behind the attack.
At trial, the defendant described her statements as “hateful” but denied that her actions were driven by racism or antisemitism.
Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews — strongly condemned the court’s latest ruling, saying it sends a troubling message and deepens concerns over how antisemitism cases are being assessed by the justice system.
“How is it possible not to see antisemitism when it is expressed so clearly, through explicit antisemitic prejudice? This incomprehensible decision calls into question the willful blindness in French society toward antisemitism when it appears as a backdrop to cases without being the sole element,” Arfi wrote in a post on X.
“Are there contexts that make antisemitic remarks acceptable to the point that the justice system refuses to see them? This legitimization of antisemitism is another step in its tragic normalization since October 7,” he continued, referring to the historic surge in antisemitic incidents following Hamas’s invasion of Israel in 2023.
“Parce qu’ils ont l’argent et le pouvoir, j’aurais jamais dû travailler pour une juive, elle n’a fait que m’apporter des problèmes”
Comment est-ce possible de ne pas voir l’antisémitisme quand il est exprimé aussi clairement, au travers de préjugés antisémites explicites ?… https://t.co/K2enyTW8Qz pic.twitter.com/kx3gCFjxTv
— Yonathan Arfi (@Yonathan_Arfi) April 15, 2026
This latest case is by no means the first in France to raise alarm bells among the Jewish community, as courts have repeatedly overturned or reduced sentences for individuals accused of antisemitic crimes, fueling public outrage over what many see as excessive leniency.
On Wednesday, the lawyers for the family of Sarah Halimi announced they have filed a request with the Paris Court of Appeal to reopen the investigation into her death nearly a decade ago, after she was brutally beaten and thrown from a third-floor window.
According to the defense, new evidence regarding the accused Kobili Traore calls into question the original ruling that found him not criminally responsible.
Among the evidence cited are alleged crack cocaine use prior to the incident, indications of premeditation, and an audio recording taken at the moment of the victim’s fall, which they claim reflects Traore’s “political and antisemitic awareness.”
Taken all together, the defense argues that these elements are incompatible with any finding of diminished responsibility.
In 2017, Traore killed Halimi, his 65-year-old neighbor, in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement of eastern Paris, brutally beating her while shouting “Allahu Akbar” before throwing her from a balcony.
Given that he was a heavy cannabis user, Traore was found not criminally responsible and has been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward since his arrest 9 years ago.
“We will do everything to ensure this murderer is brought to justice,” Halimi’s brother, William Attal, said during a press conference.
“No one can imagine the suffering my sister endured,” he continued. “If, in France today, we are unable to try and convict someone for a premeditated murder of this magnitude, then France is no longer the country it claims to be.”
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Israeli Government Report Ranks World’s 10 Most Influential Antisemites
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was part of the Global Sumud Flotilla seeking to deliver aid to Gaza and was detained by Israel, gestures as she is greeted by supporters upon her arrival to the Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport, in Athens, Greece, Oct. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism published this week its official ranking of the 10 most influential antisemitic figures in the world in 2025, and the No. 1 spot was given to social media influencer Dan Bilzerian, who is running for US Congress in Florida.
The Armenian-American entrepreneur and US military veteran is a prominent critic of Israel and Judaism who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. He has said he wants to “kill Israelis” and thinks Judaism is “terrible.” He recently claimed antisemitism is a “made-up term” and there is a “big Jewish supremacy problem” in the United States. He formally filed paperwork earlier this month to run as a Republican and unseat incumbent Jewish Rep. Randy Fine in Florida’s 6th Congressional District.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is the world’s second most influential antisemite, according to Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which highlighted her use of terms such as “genocide,” “siege,” and “mass starvation” in reference to Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip.
Third place was given to Egyptian comedian and former television host Bassem Youssef, followed by far-right American political commentator Candace Owens in fourth place and Palestinian-British journalist and editor Abdel Bari Atwan in fifth.
The list includes American imam Omar Suleiman, Denmark-based doctor Anastasia Maria Loupis – who has shared online conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel – far-right commentator and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and conspiracist Ian Carroll.
Rounding out the top 10 is far-right podcaster and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who regularly promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish influence.
Israel said the 10 most “prominent influencers in the global antisemitic and anti-Zionist arena in 2025” were selected based on “both the severity of their actions/statements and the scope of their influence” related to their activities last year. “Each of them has expressed antisemitic views or promoted false information related to Jews, Israel, or both,” the ministry explained. The list does not include individuals with formal political or government positions.
Each individual was ranked based on their influence on social media, but also other factors such as their repeated appearances on news channels, “perceived influence on public opinion, and prominence in certain communities.” The ministry also took into consideration each person’s “level of impact and risk,” which includes how often they upload antisemitic and anti-Israeli posts on social media. The report was released ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, known in Hebrew as Yom HaShoah.
In a separate section of the report dedicated to antisemitic and anti-Israel influencers in the US, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs singled out YouTuber and children’s educator Ms. Rachel, who has “increasingly used her social media accounts to amplify pro-Palestinian messages and criticize Israel.”
“Her posts have been interpreted by pro-Israel organizations as one-sided and hostile to Israel, and organizations such as StopAntisemitism have accused her of spreading anti-Israel or pro-Hamas propaganda and called for an examination of her activities,” the ministry stated.